6of6Bulgarian writer Maria Popova attends a photocall during the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival at Charlotte Square Gardens on August 22, 2018 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images)

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When Toni Morrison taught at the University at Albany while I was there, I didn't get to take her class. I did, however, walk with Morrison to the humanities building once. We chatted a bit, but I can't remember what we talked about. I'll just assume I was gushing. I had started reading her work and she would soon win the Pulitzer Prize for "Beloved." Lucky for us, Morrison has published "The Source of Self-Regard" (Knopf). I'm learning so much.

The collection of essays, convocations, commencement speeches and her Nobel speech explore race, feminism, writing, art, slavery, authors, her books, memory and more. I've been on a nonfiction feminism streak. After the #MeToo movement and the surge of women running for office, I'm feeling the power and my nightstand is stacked with mostly women writers, mostly nonfiction.

A new documentary — "The Pieces of Me" — is coming out about Morrison and I thought "Self-Regard" would be a good primer. I've been opening the book randomly and then reading her beautiful words. Here's some Morrison wisdom: "I have always myself felt most alive, most alert, and most sterling among my own people. All of my creative energy comes from there. My stimulation for any artistic effort at all originates there," she writes in "Hard, True, and Lasting," a lecture she gave in 2005 at the University of Miami.

And then there's this essay about how she came to finally call herself a writer after publishing three books: "Because before that I always said that I was an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I never said I was a writer. Never. And it's not only because of all the things you might think. It's also because most writers really and truly have to give themselves permission to win. That's very difficult, particularly for women."

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I've been a fan of Maria Popova's "Brain Pickings" newsletter for a long time. "We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins," Popova writes in her brilliant "Figuring" (Penguin Random House). "We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in coherent narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance."

It's almost 600 pages of ponderings over what it means to be a human in this world, and now "Figuring" is permanently ensconced on my porch for a summer reading marathon. She explores the lives of geniuses — mostly women — like Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. She asks "How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being? There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives."

"My hope for this book is that it will serve as a beacon for anyone who has ever felt incapable of speaking their truth or their mother's truth. The more we face what we can't or won't or don't know, the more we understand one another," Filgate writes in the introduction before launching into her own story about an abusive stepfather and a mother who failed to intervene.

Sari Botton, who lives in Kingston, wrote about how she skimmed change out of her stepbrother's fishbowl while she endured her mother's marriage to a man who had a "temper." "That's what we called it when he threw my ceramic piggy bank at me one evening while I was sitting on my bed, doing my high school homework." Botton's mother eventually divorces the man with a temper. Botton also writes tenderly about their relationship now: "These days, appropriately, the tables are turning. I'm fifty-three, she's seventy-eight, and it's my turn to take care of her."

In the essay "I Met Fear on the Hill," Leslie Jamison writes: "Trying to write about my mother is like staring at the sun. It feels like language could only tarnish this thing she has given me, my whole life – this love. For years, I've resisted writing about her. Great relationships make for bad stories." Jamison excavates the past, looking for clues to her mother's pre-mothering life in the 1960s. I laughed out loud when I read this line in Jamison's piece: "When I asked my mother what she remembers from that summer full of acid trips, lust and intrigue, long nights of weed and scratchy records, she says, 'I remember going to the library.'"

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"It's four a.m. on my father's birthday and he's in his red-sleep, the kind where his skin pulses the color of roast beef and his wedding ring looks ingrown. This is his don't-wake-me-for-three-days kind of sleep, the face-down-on-the-tile kind of sleep, which is where he is now, naked, on my parents' bathroom floor." That's T. Kira Madden writing in "Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls" (Bloomsbury). It's a memoir. And it's exquisite. After her father is woken, he's dragged along to his birthday gift — a bizarre balloon ride that ends in a cul-de-sac. The whole book is like this — unexpected and funny and sad and so, so gratifying.